Took me a minute to figure out the upgrade system, but that was a consequence of the sub-theme.  The pacing was a bit off, I thought it would be really slow until I fully understood the upgrade system, then it was super fast. That's a very fixable thing though.

I played for a bit, and I definitely could be missing something, but this mostly felt like I was clicking random upgrades and hoping they would accelerate me. As far as I can tell, the colors correspond to powers of ten, but I couldn't tell if I was spending a currency or just making the usable number as high as some cap. That made it more or less a guess as to what kind of strategy I should use. Eventually all of the dots were full... and I think that means I made a cell? But there wasn't any indication if that was actually right or if I missed a step.

I love the concept! Definitely too much clicking but I applaud you for taking on the bonus no-text challenge. Your way of conveying numbers without showing numbers was really inspired. I think it could be really cool game with some post-jam tweaks.